Tag Archives: addictive gameplay

About a year ago, I heard tell of an exciting Souls-like* game in Early Access called Dead Cells. I watched a few Let’s Plays and Let’s Look Ats, and I was immediately intrigued. However, I am chary of Early Access, and I decided to wait. Recently, it was on sale, and I was between games, so I snapped it up. I installed it, started it up, and I was hooked. The controls are intuitive (although, funny story. I went back to Dark Souls III to try a pure pyro strategy, well, close to a pure pyro, and I’ve been accidentally hitting NPCs because interact in RB in Dead Cells and A in Dark Souls III (on my Xbox One controller). Fortunately, you can hit NPCs once and not aggro them, but it’s pretty disconcerting), and soon, I was rolling, jabbing, and collecting my souls, er, cells, with the best of them.

So, speaking of souls, let’s talk about it being a Souls-like game. I’ve heard that quite a bit about Dead Cells, and I didn’t really see it when I first started playing. The more I played, though, I got the comparison. It’s funny to hear Lets Players talk about souls and Estus Flasks, and I agree it’s better to be deliberate in combat rather than just mashing buttons (though I panic-mash more often than I care to admit). However, I don’t think it’s so much that this game is Souls-like than it is that both are Metroidvanias. Sprawling levels to explore with locked off areas. Getting runes to acquire abilities to unlock said locked-off areas. In this case, permadeath, but with upgrades that you keep between runs.

When I start, I’m just a ball of goo that rolls across the floor until I reach an empty body. I inhabit the body, and then I’m ready to go. I start with a Rusty Sword, and I start wrecking fools. Or rather, they wreck me in the Prisoners’ Cells. There are random pickups on the ground, such as melee weapon (all kinds of swords), ranged weapons (bows, whips, etc.), shields, and skills (traps, grenades, meat grinder, etc.). There are also upgrades and gold balls you hit to break and scatter. There are secrets in the wall that are marked with a faint rune, and you hit them to open them. They usually contain some kind of gem (gold) or food (kebabs and chicken so far), which is a nice pick-me-up.

You can speed run through the area to try to make it to the timed door in the next area, but the time limit is really strict. To make the first timed door, you have to get there in under two minutes. I’ve done it a few times, but that means skipping most of the first area and not getting the upgrades. Behind the timed door is *spoilers* good loot such as one upgrade (strength, tactical, or skill, and each includes a health upgrade), several gems/gold/coins, a bunch of cells–oh! forgot to say that the cells are used for the permanent upgrades at the end of each level–and sometimes a blueprint for a new weapon/shield/skill. I don’t think it’s worth it, though, because you have to take the blueprint and cells to the end of the level in order to cash in on them, and I feel severely under-leveled if I don’t clear out the first area before proceeding. I’ve never made it to the other timed doors, and I don’t really care.

Let’s talk upgrading. After each level, you can talk to the Collector who’ll use your cells to make whatever you want (and if you have blueprints for it). When you first start the game, you don’t have any ability to heal. You can buy the Estus Flask from the collector for fairly cheap, and you get one gulp. Each upgrade is successively more expensive, and I’m up to three swigs. You have to spend all your souls–cells!–before moving onto the mutation guy, though I just found out that you can break that door down to save your cells. There’s a reason for doing this, which I’ll get to in a minute.

The adorable mutation guy lets you choose one mutation after each level. This can be as simple as more health, or as specific as an X amount of increase in damage for Y amount of seconds after killing an enemy. You can unlock more of these by spending your cells with the Collector. My favorite is Ygdar Orus Li Ox, which brings you back from death once, but you can only pick it up after the first level. I guess it’s so you won’t choose it right before a boss fight, but so what if you do? It’s irritating that I have to carry it all the way through all the levels if I want it to actually help me during a boss fight.

This is my way of playing video games. I find one that I really like, then I play the hell out of it until I’m done with it. The first game I played was Torchlight, and I gulped it down from beginning to end. I loved the hell out of my player-character, The Vanquisher, in part because she looked Asian if you squint. Mostly, though, it was just as fun as hell, and I played it for hours on end. It’s the same with Torchlight 2 (not quite as good, though I’m in the minority for saying so), Borderlands 1 and 2 (with all the DLC, but I didn’t finish all the DLC for the second game because I got burned out), Diablo 3, all the Dark Souls—

By the way, I am excited beyond belief, and a touch freaked out, because I just bought a used PS4 at a really good price FOR THE SOLE PURPOSE OF PLAYING BLOODBORNE. I know this is what a crazy person does, but I’m a huge Miyazaki fangrrl, and once the opportunity was presented to me, I couldn’t resist. I know this game is going to kick my ass because the shield is a no-go and magic is not really viable until the end-game, but I know I’m going to soak up every brutal moment of it.

My point in mentioning it is that I’m going to play the shit out of Bloodborne, even if it kills me, which it will. Many times. Over and over. I got the super-deluxe complete uber edition, which means the hard-as-balls DLC, The Old Hunters. In a series known for how difficult it is, the BB DLC is perhaps the hardest of the lot.

I played Salt and Sanctuary compulsively until I beat it, and then I started a melee build and made it about two-thirds of the way through before I was done. Goddamn Witch of the Lake ruined me as a melee character. In fact, the bosses are much harder to fight as a melee character than as a caster. I did beat her, but I was just Done.

The other game I played obsessively was Cook, Serve, Delicious! , which is goddamn fucking addictive. The sequel was announced waaaaay back in 2014 or 2015, and I was unbelievably hyped about the sequel. It kept getting delayed, and I was afraid it would never get published. Well, it finally came out, and I wrote about my quick impressions after playing it for several hours in less than two days. There weren’t many reviews of it because it’s really niche, but Northernlion (he’s the one who turned me on to the original) did a Let’s Look At of it that was mostly positive.